Raccoon Removal Cost Calculator

About $575 with three entry points sealed, $400 with one opening and $825 with six. Reported figures are $400 to $600, rising to about $750 where a nest of young has to be removed by hand. A chimney rather than an attic adds about 15%, and removing droppings and soiled insulation adds about 45%, taking a typical job to $825 — or $1,265 where the accumulation is heavy.

Because a raccoon has hands and roughly the strength of a small dog. It pulls off plastic vent covers, lifts shingles, tears light wire mesh and soft aluminum, and opens things a squirrel would only squeeze through. So the exclusion has to be 19 gauge galvanized hardware cloth or sheet metal screwed down with washers, and the trapping involves daily checks and a relocation drive rather than a one-way door. Same house, same number of openings, more expensive animal.

Between March and June, assume so until somebody proves otherwise — a female chooses an attic or a chimney precisely because it is a safe place to have a litter. This matters more than the price: sealing the opening without removing the young puts the mother outside and the kits inside, and a week later that is a dead-animal problem inside a wall, which is a demolition and remediation job costing multiples of doing it properly. Done right, the young are located and removed by hand, which is also easier, because a mother follows her kits into a transfer cage and a mother separated from them will tear a new hole in the roof.

Something will, if the openings are not closed. Not necessarily the same individual, but the house: a roof one raccoon got into is attractive and accessible, and raccoons follow scent to a den site that has been used before. That is the whole argument for paying for exclusion rather than just trapping, and it is why two questions matter — whether the operator warranties the sealed openings, and whether the attic is being deodorized. Scent removal sounds like an upsell and is not.

Yes, and it is the reason cleanup should not be treated as optional. Raccoon droppings can carry Baylisascaris procyonis, a roundworm whose eggs survive in the environment for years and resist most disinfectants, and human infection is rare but serious. In a house with children or anyone immunocompromised, treat the cleanup as part of the job. Droppings are not swept: the material is removed, the soiled insulation taken out and replaced, and the surfaces treated, in a respirator. That adds about 45% here, and a years-deep accumulation runs to the $1,000-4,000 attic cleanup figures reported nationally.

Timing and weight. Raccoons are nocturnal and heavy: you hear thumps and something that sounds like a person moving around overhead, usually starting around dusk, often with chittering or growling vocalizations. Squirrels are active at dawn and during the day and sound like scratching and rolling in short bursts. The other tells are the size of the opening — a raccoon needs about four inches and usually leaves visible damage around it — and the droppings, which are much larger. An operator should identify the species before quoting.

Not safely, and an uncapped chimney is the most common raccoon entrance there is. A raccoon in a flue is usually a female with kits on the smoke shelf, which is why lighting a fire to drive them out is both cruel and ineffective — and in a lined flue it is a fire risk. The proper sequence is to confirm whether there are young, remove them and the adult, then fit a stainless steel chimney cap, which is worth doing whether or not anything is living in there now. Chimney work adds about 15% to this page because of the height and the flue.

It depends entirely on your state, and most states regulate this more than people expect. Many prohibit relocating trapped wildlife beyond a short distance or at all, because of disease transmission, which means the humane-sounding promise to release it in the woods is sometimes not lawful. Some require euthanasia for certain species or in rabies-vector designations. Ask what your state requires and what the operator will actually do — a clear answer indicates somebody who knows the rules, and a vague one is worth following up.

Yes, and it is one of the better-value items in this whole subject. A stainless steel chimney cap keeps out raccoons, squirrels, birds and bats, keeps rain off the flue, and stops downdrafts — and an uncapped flue is the single most common entrance for an animal into a house. It is cheap relative to a wildlife call, and fitting one while somebody is already on the roof dealing with an animal costs much less than a separate visit. Insist on stainless rather than galvanized, which rusts out and then falls in.

Usually not the removal, and sometimes the damage. Most policies exclude damage caused by rodents and vermin, and insurers differ on whether a raccoon counts — some treat raccoon damage as covered sudden damage and others exclude it under the same vermin clause. What is more often covered is consequential damage, such as water entering through a hole a raccoon tore in the roof. It is worth a call to your insurer before the repair, and worth photographing the damage and keeping the operator's written entry-point list either way.